Trauma

The effects of the traumatic things we’ve been through in life have a tendency of chasing us into the present, kicking up reminders of the pain we experienced. Sometimes its in the form of nightmares or flashbacks. Sometimes it’s stubborn anxiety that you might not even be sure is connected to your past. Sometimes its the voice inside that keeps telling you that you aren’t good enough, it’s always going to be like this, or this is just who you are. When you carry all of that around with you, it can make you feel disconnected from life, yourself, and the people you care about.

Sometimes we refer to trauma as a psychological wound, and it’s a pretty fitting description. Just like with physical injuries, with the right care, they can be healed but if we neglect their care, they can fester. If you broke your arm, you’d need to get it set, right? Then you might wear a cast until the bones are able to mend. But what would happen if you didn’t get the proper treatment? It wouldn’t heal correctly. You might end up with bones that are misaligned and cause you frequent pain. You might find that even just moving specific ways or holding something too long would be enough to trigger it.

It’s the same with psychological wounds. When we go through things that cause major hurt, damages our sense of safety or our sense of self, it hits us like an injury that remains tender. As we go through life, even small things that seem completely unrelated to what we went through can still manage to trigger the pain. And just like with a broken bone, a psychological wound has treatments that help re-align us so that we can heal.

EMDR Therapy

That’s where a therapy like EMDR comes in. It stands for eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing and it’s an evidence based treatment for Post Traumatic Stress. It’s different from talk therapy and it’s one of the more gentle types of treatment for trauma.

Generally, the human brain is pretty good at processing the things we go through, but sometimes we experience things that are so big they overwhelm the brain’s natural processing system. When that happens, the experience gets stuck with all of the same feelings, sensations, and thoughts we had at the time of the trauma. But the brain knows that it needs to process what’s happened so it keeps trying. But for all it’s trying, all it does is kick up symptoms. If you’ve ever gotten a vehicle stuck in the mud, you know that no matter how hard you press the gas to get yourself out, all it does is kick up more mud. That’s exactly what happens with the brain. It keeps trying to process the traumatic experience but all it does is kick up nightmares, anxiety, flashbacks, reactive emotions, and old patterns.

When that happens, we need a little help getting out of the mud. EMDR is a very effective tool to help.

Scientists believe that the brain’s natural processing system is activated during REM sleep when your eyes move back and forth and you dream. EMDR uses this same bilateral stimulation (eye movement) to help stimulate the processing system while giving the brain the information it needs to get itself unstuck. Some people say it sounds a little “Star-treky” and they’re not wrong. But regardless, the good news is that EMDR works and it’s got the data to prove it. That’s something most people really want to know when they are considering whether or not they are able and willing to revisit those past hurts. They ask—will this be worth it? While no one can guarantee it, the chances of it helping are very high.

Other questions people ask are:

Am I going to have to go into detail about what happened to me the first time I meet my therapist?

No. We take it at your pace and we never push you to work on your past hurts before you are ready. Before we get to the place where you are processing the things that have happened to you, we’ll do a brief trauma history that just gives us a very basic overview of what we need to be working on. Then we’ll spend time helping you create calming resources that will help you feel grounded and calmer before we ever get into what you’ve experienced. Once you’re ready, we’ll walk you through it step by step.

So you’re going to wave your fingers in front of my face and that’s going to make it go away?

Well, yes and no. EMDR does involve following a therapists fingers with your eyes but there’s also a lot more to it than that. The bilateral movement your eyes are following just help your brain chain together pieces of what you’ve experienced that need to be dealt with. You may have thoughts, images, emotions, or sensations come up while we’re working and your job is to simply notice them and let your brain keep doing what it’s doing. The rest is up to your therapist to guide you through.

Our Clinicians Who Offer EMDR: